Description
Self-Portrait with Cigarette
Self-Portrait with Cigarette by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1895, held by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo under inventory number NG.M.00470. It measures 85.5 x 110.5 cm and shows the painter at half length, turned straight towards the viewer: a dark suit with a white collar and a dark bow tie, the right hand raised, a cigarette burning between the fingers and its smoke rising in a thin thread. Face and hand are lit from below, as if by footlights, while the coat and the background dissolve into a bluish grey haze. The canvas is signed and dated: E.Munch 1895. This is the version our hand-painted reproduction follows.
The painter was thirty-one at the time, with an eventful Berlin period behind him. Lighting a sitter from below was unusual in the portraiture of those years; the eyes are wide open and look straight out, while the body is literally lost into the background at its edges – an unusually open picture of uncertainty for a self-portrait.
Munch laid the paint on thin and runny: along the lower edge of the canvas the runs of colour that trickled downward are still visible, and he did not remove them. The hand with the cigarette is the brightest passage in the picture and leads the eye before the face does; that emphasis is what gave the work its title.
Our reproduction is hand-painted throughout in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke and always to order; it is not a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one copy to the next.
The picture is dark and concentrated, so it works best on a quiet wall out of direct light – a study, a library or a hallway, where it can be looked at from close to. Its bluish grey and black sit well with darker wood and light walls; because the motif is a single face, it needs no neighbour and carries a solitary hanging.
It is available in ten sizes, from a smaller upright format to a large canvas, and we can also make it to a size you specify. Other works by the same artist are among the paintings of Edvard Munch, and his life and work are covered in the biography of Edvard Munch.
| Year: | 1895 |
| Original size: | 85.5 cm x 110.5 cm |
| Style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo |
